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InfoVis of the Week – 6

Carmen

Liveplasma is a music and movie visualization app that aims to help you discover other musicians or movies you might enjoy. Type in the name of a band, artist, movie, director or actor and liveplasma will show you related people, bands or movies. [1]

Liveplasma – Adele [2]

This specific screenshot from the Liveplasma website shows the visualization for Adele. This shows all artists that are related to Adele and how they relate to each other. When selecting another artist, the visualization will recalculate to visualize all related artist to the selected one. In this way, it is very easy to discover new, related music. Another nice feature is that the music which is being discover, will be played back on the website while doing so which makes it easier to bring your personal preferences of music into the discovery process.

This feature of playing back music within the visualization (or including a direct link to the music) is something that we should look into for our own visualization as well as this will make the exploration process for the user a lot easier.

Birgit

This week, I came across a visualisation of Wikipedia edits.

The interactive visualisation shows every edit made in Wikipedia, real-time. Green circles are edits by unregistered users, purple ones are made by registered contributors. The interesting thing in this visualisation is that another dimension is added to it: sound. Every time an edit is made and a circle appears, you hear either a bell sound or a string pluck. When you hear a bell, it means an addition has been made, a string pluck indicates a subtraction. The note also indicates the size of the edit: the deeper the note, the larger the edit.

Here, the sound adds information – it indicates additions and subtractions. Hence, the makers were able to keep the visualisation very simple, while still ‘displaying’ all information they wanted to. This seems to be the biggest strength to me in this visualisation, and it makes you think of other ways to ‘visualise’ data.